wide field astrophotography
The Pinwheel Galaxy (M101, NGC 5457) is a face-on spiral galaxy sitting roughly 21 million light years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major (The Great Bear). It is about twice the size of our Milky Way Galaxy and contains an estimated one trillion stars.
This first attempt at capturing M101 was shot with a Nikon DSLR (D750) and a wide field (61mm) telescope from Bortle 5 skies in June 2021. Also seen in the image below and to the right of M101 is the dwarf galaxy NGC 5474.
Nikon D750 | WO Zenithstar 61ii 360mm | 56 min exposure | 2021-06-01
Astrometric annotations show some of the surrounding deep space objects (DSO).
